MacMost: Photos

While Photos has a lot of adjustment and cropping tools, you can also use your favorite image editor directly with the Photos app. You can choose to edit the photo in an editor and have the results saved back to your library, or you can use an editing extension for even tighter integration. See examples using Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Pro.

A new feature in iOS 16 is the ability to easily select only the subject of a photo and drag it to another app or copy and paste it. You can use this to send just the subject of a photo without the background in a message or place it in a layer of an image editing app.

A new feature in iOS 16 for the iPhone allows you to see duplicates in your Photos library and delete or merge them. This same feature is coming to iPadOS 16 and also macOS Ventura.

Often people ask me about duplicate photos or files when all they are seeing is two different ways of viewing the same single photo or file. For instance, albums in Photos show the same photos as the Library, and Recents and the Desktop in the Finder show files you can also see elsewhere. It is important to understand why these aren't duplicate items to avoid deleting the one and only copy of a photo or file.

Photos will easily mark pictures as containing people's faces, as long as they are human. But you can also manually add your pets or anything you like to the People feature manually.

Learn the various ways you can export files from the Photos app on your Mac. You can do a simple drag-and-drop, but you'll get more options if you use File, Export. You can also export directly to another app, or save as a PDF.

The Photos app gives you many ways to search through your photos. You can look by person, dates, locations, objects, titles, camera type and so much more. You can also combine these in ways to get interesting results.

When dealing with image files on your Mac, it is useful to know the difference between JPEG and GIF files, what HEIC or HEIF files are, what RAW means, and when to use a PNG file.

Perhaps the most creative tool in the Photos app is the ability to use Markup tools directly on photos. You can add text, shapes and draw. Here ate 10 creative ways to use Markup on your photos.

You probably have dozens or hundreds of photos in your Photos Librar you can use as social media profile pictures. Learn how to easily find the best ones, crop, adjust and apply filters, and create great social media profile pictures that are ready to use.

There are a lot of adjustments you can make to photos in the Mac Photos app, but to get started learn these 7 simple steps.

You can use either Pages or Keynote to build a photo collage. Pages is better suited to printing and exporting PDFs. Keynote is best for creating collages to be shared online or viewed on your screen. Both apps have the same tools so building a collage is similar in either app.

When you import photos from a camera or card into the Mac Photos app, you can choose to skip duplicates and place photos directly into an album. But you can also use this powerful feature when just importing files as well.

Smart Albums are a handy tool in Mac Photos that can be used to view photos in your library that match certain criteria. Unlike regular albums, you don't add photos to the album manually and they automatically update as you add new photos.

Hidden on your Mac is a set of image filters that you can use on your image files. You can access them in an Automator action, which means you can easily build a simple app that will allow you to apply them to an image quickly. Access filters like blur, comic book, pixelate, neon, and so many more. You can even use this to quickly resize images.

If you need to grab a single frame from a video and turn it into a still image or add it to your Photos library, you can do it using a few steps even though a direct function for that doesn't exist in the current Photos app. Here are two methods you can use.

The Mac Photos app has some deep functionality and even regular users may not know some of these tips. Learn how to search by photo contents, convert Live Photos to long exposure pictures, export contact sheet PDFs, adjust and filter videos, create multiple libraries and much more.

You can share photos online using the Photos app on your Mac and iCloud. Others can view it on a public website on in their Photos app. You can also make the album private and allow others to add photos and comments to the album.

Your Photos app on your Mac will occasionally suggest groups of photos to view as Memories. You can view the photos in the Memory, or watch it as a slideshow. You can also save Memories and let Photos know if you'd like to see fewer memories like the one you are viewing.

MacOS Big Sur adds the ability for you to adjust, filter, crop, rotate and trim videos right in the Photos app, without needing to go to iMovie or Final Cut Pro. You can use the same editing techniques you use for photos, but applied to an entire video.